Description
The mobility turn emphasises the richness and relevance of mobile settings for academic research. Researching the Austrian destination of Salzkammergut in regard to its event-based regeneration process of the European Capital of Culture in 2024, my research project ‘Between Culture and Salt’ required me to conceptual, empirical and analytical explore what a destination in movement can mean.For this research, I developed the method Postcards of the Future, which combines postcard imaginaries with the mobile setting of a regional train line. Running along a north–south axis, this line has long been described locally as the region’s aorta or heartbeat, facilitating the movement of people, ideas, infrastructures and power relations for over a century, both within and beyond the region. Drawing on this historical and contemporary significance, a blank postcard was used as a research prompt to elicit participants’ imaginations of possible regional futures.
The resulting rich qualitative material was subsequently translated, in collaboration with multimedia artist Elza Grimm and curator Angelica Doppelbauer, into a series of printed postcards visualising diverse future imaginaries in postcard format. In order to expand the local perspective through a global conversation, the created postcards were circulated within a global network of mail art artists, who were invited to alter, amend and recycle the materials in order to generate new responses to the question ‘What does the future look like?’.
The collective outcomes formed the basis of the exhibition ‘Risky Views: The Future in Postcards’ at the Museum of Writing and Local History in Pettenbach, Austria.
Reflecting upon this mobile and creative methodological approach, the project encourages reflections about the present and the future, the digital and the analogue, the global and the local in the context of a destination in movement.
| Period | 1 Jul 2026 |
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| Held at | Western Sydney University, Australia |